- La Poste is exposed to major network incidents that disrupt all online services and apps
- Banking partially functional: SMS authentication, ATMs, POS payments and WERO transfers remain available
- Cause unclear: suspected ransomware, but local media suggest possible DDoS attack
France’s national postal service, La Poste, is currently experiencing disruptions due to a “major network incident” at one of its busiest times of the year.
In a brief announcement published on the organization’s Facebook page, it said that all of the organization’s information systems are currently disrupted.
“Our online services – La Banque Postale online and mobile app, laposte.fr, Digiposte, La Poste Digital Identity and the La Poste app – are temporarily unavailable,” reads the message, machine translated.
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At press time, the laposte.fr website was actually offline, displaying only a brief message saying “Our website is unavailable.”
“Our teams are making every effort to restore the situation as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
La Poste also said that for bank customers, online payments remained possible with SMS authentication and that cash withdrawals at ATMs, card payments at in-store POS terminals and transfers via WERO were still available.
However, Banque Postale, a bank run by La Poste, also appears to be experiencing problems. The X said that an incident currently “disrupted the availability of part of our information systems. All our teams are fully mobilized to restore the situation as soon as possible.”
Payments and SMS-based 2FA were said to work unabated, while the bank’s app and online services were forced offline.
“Service may be temporarily impaired at some post offices. However, you can still carry out your banking and postal transactions at the counter,” La Poste added on Facebook.
The postal service did not say what kind of incident it was dealing with. Such a highly disruptive attack bears all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack, but local media outlet Le Monde Informatique says this is instead a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
According to The registerthe Cloudflare Radar service recorded “some traffic spikes” on Monday, but not enough to definitively determine it was a DDoS incident.
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